Some people seek perfection. UC Santa Barbara materials professor Daniel Gianola is focused on creating, finding and exploring imperfections, with an eye to developing new and better materials.
“Our work is all about the imperfections — defects — because they control a material’s properties, so we want to be able to see them and their dynamics, and that’s what we do in the microscope,” Gianola said.
“Realizing the countless materials-based technologies that have been developed at UCSB and elsewhere requires a deep understanding of the structure of a material and how it informs its unique characteristics and capacities — a continuous learning process,” said Umesh Mishra, dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering. “Dan Gianola’s lab has helped not only to expand the capacity of existing characterization tools — especially in the realm of electron microscopy — but also the development of new ones used in such research. He richly deserves these honors, and we at the COE offer him both our sincere congratulations and our gratitude for his key role in making possible so many advances in materials science and engineering.”
Gianola has for years focused his research on characterizing materials across many length scales, including down to the atomic level, especially materials applied in extreme environments, such as components for jet engines and lightweight transportation.
The phrase “materials that stubbornly refuse to behave,” Gianola said, “is a general statement, but it gets at the core tenet of materials science, which is to elucidate the relationships among structure and property, which, in turn allows materials scientists to design and synthesize new materials to meet the demands of next-generation technologies.”